hem happy
dreams.

A few days' residence among these untutored red men made Emma and Anna
great favorites among them; their pleasant dispositions, their good
nature, and, above all, their love for the little Winona, which was
fully reciprocated, endeared them to the father and mother of the Indian
girl. Though sad at being separated from their parents, and though they
often wept until they could weep no longer when they thought of home,
yet their hearts, like those of all children, were easily consoled, and
their spirits were so elastic that they could not long be depressed.
Winona loved them tenderly; at night she slept between them, and during
the day she would never leave them. She wore garlands of their
wreathing, listened to their English songs, stroked their rosy cheeks,
and frolicked with them in the woods, and beside the running brooks.

Two months passed away; all the Indian women in the village were
speaking of the love that had sprung up between the little white girls
and the copper-colored Winona; and many a hard hand smoothed the golden
curls of the little captives in token of affection. Then Winona was
taken sick; her body glowed with the fever-heat, her bright eyes became
dull, and day and night she moaned with pain. With surprising care and
tenderness, Emma and Anna nursed the suffering child,--for to them were
her glowing and burning hands extended for relief, rather than to her
mother. They held her throbbing head, lulled her to sleep, bathed her
hot temples, moistened her parched lips, and soothed her distresses; but
they could not win her from the power of death--and she died!

Oh, it was a sorrowful thing to them to part with their little
playmate,--to see the damp earth heaped upon her lovely form, and to
feel that she was forever hidden from their sight! They wept, and, with
the almost frantic mother, laid their faces on the tiny grave, and
moistened it with their tears. Hither they often came to scatter the
freshest flowers, and to weep for the home they feared they would never
again see; and here they often kneeled in united prayer to that God, who
bends on prayerful children a loving eye, and spreads over them a
shadowing wing.

The childless Indian woman now loved them more than ever; but the death
of Winona had opened afresh the fountains of their grief, and often did
she find them weeping so bitterly that she could not comfort them. She
would draw them to her bosom, and tenderly caress t